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Google glitch flooded at least one poor guy's inbox

Users around the world dealt with Gmail woes earlier today, but at least one faced an even stranger Gmail problem. David Peck, a private banker from Fresno, California, has been receiving thousands and thousands of emails from strangers -- all because of a bizarre Google search result glitch that apparently kicked in yesterday.

The culprit? A dodgy link that appeared when users perform a Google search for "Gmail." If they were logged into a Gmail account at the time, clicking that link opened a blank email aimed at Mr. Peck's Hotmail address, and more than a few curious users decided to fire off messages. Some of those myriad emails were questions, some were blank, but Peck told TechCrunch that he was receiving about 500 emails an hour.

Turns out, Mr. Peck may not have been the only victim here. Earlier this week, Search Engine Land reported a similar link issue that pointed to yet more people's email addresses. We haven't received reports of other inboxes getting slammed by strangers, but a Google spokesperson just confirmed that the now-fixed glitch caused "some email addresses on public webpages" to "appear too prominently in search results." Peck's story started making the rounds on the heels of a widespread Google app outage, but that was just bad timing -- the company also stated that the two issues were unrelated.